Do you ever want to tell people that you aren’t who you used to be?
When I was in fourth grade one of the most devastating things in my life happened to me. Her name was Stephanie and the whole summer she had been my best friend.
We moved earlier that summer and to our delight, a little girl lived down the street from us that was my age. We bonded immediately over barbies and swimming in her large pool. We laughed in her day bed that had white, lacy curtains and I pretended to be rich stepping onto her private balcony, playing with make-up in her own princess bathroom and playing dress up in her walk in closet. There was even a secret staircase and I dreamed of a closet that led to Narnia somewhere in that house.
That all changed when I went to school a few months later and she stopped talking to me. I never knew why. A strange part of me twisted and died in that time. I didn’t fit in this small town culture. My best – who I was at a person- just wasn’t good enough. I let that become a part of my identity subconsciously. Sometimes, a councilor told me, it’s not what happens to you- it’s how you it affects you that is so devastating.
Do you know it takes time to get over things like that? Even when I did forgive her and move on, it took time before I started to live my life in the restoration of my brokeness.
Do you know what I mean?
You can think you are over something, even feel peace about it but until you actually WALK in the confidence of that healing place and in truth- you aren’t truly changed.
“Confidence,” my friend said last summer, speaking without knowing it into my very soul.
I nodded in earnest agreement, “I know!” but I wasn’t living in it.
You see, I let that one girl’s rejection and poison against me strip me of my God given confidence in who I was as a person. I let the fact she told everyone not to talk to me rob me of my inheritance. I spent a few years mostly alone after this at school and even when I had friends I kept waiting for them to reject me. I was stuck. For most of my life, actually.
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The fact is that we are all the walking wounded. We can choose to ignore pain and build shaky layer after layer on a cracked foundation or you can strip away all the fake and get soul deep good.
These last few years, so much has been stripped down in circumstances beyond my control but I see the good of it now. I’ve been able to rebuild on a solid foundation. The last year has been insane and the least few months as well. Each month I feel an adrenaline surge of wondering, what, God, is next?
I’m done with the fake. and you know what else? 
I’m not who I used to be. I hope we get to meet again.
